Vivid 'Dredd 3D' Makes Rival Thrillers Look Flat

'Plague' is a striking true tale of AIDS activists; Eastwood is in trouble with 'the Curve'

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Karl Urban in 'Dredd 3D.'
Lionsgate

By

Joe Morgenstern

Sept. 20, 2012 5:01 p.m. ET

"Dredd 3D" is the iPhone of recent action thrillers. The movie doesn't do apps, or, for that matter, drop calls, but this particularly violent thriller is distinguished by elegant design. What's familiar about the film is the grunge concatenation of firepower, body count and gross-out abuse of all-too-tender flesh. What's exceptional is the orchestration of color, form, light and dark (lots of dark), 3-D technology and digital effects into a look that amounts to a vision.

The director was Pete Travis, working from a shrewd, terse screenplay by Alex Garland; the production designer was Mark Digby, and the cinematographer was Anthony Dod Mantle. (The latter two collaborated similarly on "Slumdog Millionaire.") The opening shot is a variation on the theme of "WALL•E"—a slow flyby over a vast garbage dump of a megalopolis in a blighted future, except that this sprawl, Mega City One, is fully inhabited. The city is a battleground between free-range criminals and so-called Judges, the Robocop-ish descendants of Rambo who function as judges, juries and executioners, not to mention noisemakers, what with their flatulent motorcycles and end-of-days weaponry. Chief among them is, yes, you guessed it, Judge Dredd, who was played by a glum Sylvester Stallone in the fairly dreadful 1995 film "Judge Dredd," and who is played this time around by Karl Urban.

'Played' is a big word for what the helmeted actor is able to do with his husky voice, slyly laconic dialogue and the visible parts of his face, i.e. his scowl and stubble. Dredd's partner, an anxious rookie named Cassandra, doesn't wear a helmet, since it would scramble her psychic powers, so she is played visibly, as well as audibly, by Olivia Thirlby, who succeeds in investing an action figure with affecting fear, impressive courage and a commitment to justice that serves as Cassandra's compass.

The story has been assembled from repurposed genre elements: a vertical ghetto, 200 stories high, controlled by a scar-faced prostitute turned drug lord—or drug lady—named Ma-Ma; she's played to a lurid fare-thee-well by Lena Headey. And Ma-Ma's product comes out of a shop that looks a lot like an industrial-scale meth lab. But it's the nature of the drug that dictates much of the production's visual distinction. The compound in question, Slo-Mo, makes its addicts feel as if time is passing at 1% of its normal speed.

The effects of Slo-Mo are visualized by super-slo-mo cinematography in sequences of dreamy sumptuousness: iridescent soap bubbles afloat over Ma-Ma's bathtub (and, thanks to the 3-D, over the first few rows of theater seats); bodies falling ever so slo-moly onto public spaces; one body drifting down an elevator shaft in the company of glass shards that flutter and swirl like clouds of what used to be called, in a more innocent time, Disney Dust.

Occasionally, "Dredd 3D" bogs down in passages that aren't supposed to be slow; the movie will almost stop, every now and then, to admire its own physical beauty. And there's no way of elevating those exploding heads and sliced-off limbs into dramatic art. All the same, the juxtaposition of brutality and improbable chivalry, in a dystopia built on the foundations of "Blade Runner," "Brazil" and even "Naked City," is a vision that's hard to dismiss.

Watch a clip from the documentary "How to Survive a Plague," the story of two coalitions, ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), whose activism turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition. (Video: Sundance Selects)

'How to Survive a Plague'

If you watched "How to Survive a Plague" with the sound turned off, you would readily see it as a history of the struggle to make a city, and then a nation, aware of AIDS, that disease of fearful virulence for which there was no treatment when it first emerged in this country in the early 1980s. The archival footage, most of it shot by the participants, tells the tale vividly: demonstrations in New York, confrontations in Washington, acts of civil disobedience, street theater performed by activists determined to accelerate the laggardly pace of research by the government and the pharmaceutical industry. That's a stirring tale, but an incomplete one. Turn up the sound, tune in to the passionate voices in David France's brilliant documentary and you learn how some members of the activist group Act Up—members who, in many cases, were HIV positive—became instrumental in developing and testing the protease inhibitors that have finally proved equal to the plague.

They did so out of desperation, of course, feeling themselves doomed to the fate that was decimating the gay community. What's so remarkable about their decadeslong campaign, though, is how desperation led to inspiration—to the inspired notion that they, as nonscientists, could still take their fate in their own hands. By applying sufficient logic and mastering sufficient science—by wielding brain power as well as street power, as one man puts it—they were able to join forces with Big Pharma, FDA officials and National Institutes of Health doctors, not only in focusing on promising drugs but in designing drug trials that were both responsible and expeditious.

Susan Ellenberg, a former chief biostatistician at the NIH's division of AIDS, recalls being excited and impressed by Act Up's strategy. "They were not against drug trials," she tells Mr. France's camera. "They wanted to get the right answers, but they wanted humane trials." A similar tribute comes from Dr. Anthony Fauci, then as now the NIH's director of AIDS research: "They elevated themselves with their self-education." And one of the leaders of Act Up's campaign, Peter Staley, closes the film with a stirring postscript: "The way we did it, the way we took care of ourselves and each other…is just mind-boggling. Just incredible." It's an upbeat ending subject to a stark reservation. Millions of people around the world are still dying of AIDS every year, an end-title card notes, because they can't afford the drugs that could keep them alive.

Watch a clip from the film "End of Watch." Two young officers (Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña) are marked for death after confiscating a small cache of money and firearms from the members of a notorious cartel, during a routine traffic stop.

'End of Watch'

David Ayer's "End of Watch" derives huge energy, most of it false, from Roman Vasyanov's cinematography, as well as from genuinely impressive performances by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña. It's not too much to say that, like "Dredd 3D," this pounding saga of street-cop partners in Los Angeles is often about cinematography, since everyone is either shooting video—Mr. Gyllenhaal's Officer Brian Taylor is a would-be filmmaker—or being shot (by dashboard cameras, hidden cameras and surveillance cameras), not to mention being shot at by a bloodthirsty succession of really, really bad guys and girls who are involved with the closest thing to al Qaeda that the movies can come up with on domestic soil, the Sinaloa cartel.

Shallow down inside, "End of Watch" is a music-video Frappuccino of quick cuts, sparkling banter, serial crises, grisly violence and tongue-jerk profanity. (The f*****g quotient is astronomical. So is the producer quotient; 16 of them listed in the credits.) But the film is exciting, in its manipulative way, and exhausting, and occasionally relieved by the humanity of Brian's love for Janet, a bright, lively woman played by the always appealing Anna Kendrick. What's more, it's a great recruiting tool for the LAPD. Unencumbered by nuance, these cops are as pure as they are brave.

Watch a clip from the film "Trouble with the Curve." An ailing baseball scout (Clint Eastwood) takes his daughter (Amy Adams) along for one last recruiting trip. Also starring John Goodman, Justin Timberlake, and Robert Patrick. (Video: Warner Bros.)

ENLARGE

Clint Eastwood and Justin Timberlake in 'Trouble With the Curve.'
Warner Bros. Pictures

'Trouble With the Curve'

This antediluvian baseball drama stars Clint Eastwood as a washed-up scout, Gus, and Amy Adams as Mickey, the daughter who reluctantly teams up with him. The director was Robert Lorenz, who has worked with Mr. Eastwood since the mid-1990s as a producer, an assistant director or both. It's his debut feature, and bush league almost all the way, a lifeless rendering of an amateurish script (by Randy Brown) that covers some of the same ground as "Moneyball"—old-fashioned intuition versus newfangled number-crunching—but covers it from some time warp where audiences still enjoy declamatory acting, mawkish sentiments and wheezy editing.

The movie's most glaring problem is Mr. Eastwood's decision to play, not very well, pretty much the same character he portrayed most recently in "Gran Torino"—an old geezer who has an enlarged prostate, macular degeneration and a misanthropic demeanor that's supposed to be lovable, except that it isn't; Gus is mostly a tiresome grump. Ms. Adams does her endearing best to lighten things up. Along with Mickey's touching efforts at reconciliation with her father, she has some enjoyable encounters with Justin Timberlake's Johnny, a charming ex-pitcher who's trying to reinvent himself as a play-by-play announcer. "Trouble With the Curve" finally finds its zone when Gus and Mickey find the young baseball prodigy they've been looking for. That doesn't happen until the narrative's last inning, though, too late to save the movie. I'd call it "Neanderthalball."

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DVD Focus

'Zabriskie Point' (1970)

The Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni used slow-motion cinematography as it had never been used before, to evoke a vision of America and its consumer goods blowing up in a spectacular apocalypse. At this late date that's the only reason to watch the film, an ignominious lapse by a cinema master that deplores all things American, except for our nation's supposedly innocent youth. (The fatuous iconography came out of the 1960s, reinforced by European condescension.) The young hero, Mark (Mark Frechette) and young heroine, Daria (Daria Halprin), meet in Death Valley, where the heat is searing and the dialogue is dead.

'Milk' (2008)

Gus Van Sant's film, with Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, opens on the gay activist and San Francisco supervisor dictating into a tape recorder. The year is 1978, and the words are taken from a tape, full of foreboding, that Milk dictated shortly before he, and the city's mayor, George Moscone, were shot to death by a former supervisor, Dan White. Mr. Penn won an Oscar for his performance; so did Dustin Lance Black for his screenplay. Milk's life had previously been celebrated in Rob Epstein's 1984 documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk," which won the Oscar it deserved.

'The Good Girl' (2002)

Jake Gyllenhaal is an amorous adolescent who calls himself Holden—he thinks he's an embodiment of J.D. Salinger's literary hero—in this singularly interesting and often misunderstood film that Miguel Arteta directed from an original script by Mike White. The misunderstanding centers on Jennifer Aniston as Justine, an unhappy wife who's disconnected from her feelings, and from the consequences of her behavior. Detractors have called her performance dull. I've called it impeccable, and austere. The fine cast includes Mr. White, John C. Reilly, Tim Blake Nelson and Zooey Deschanel.

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